CHARLAINE HARRIS – Shakespeare’s Champion.

CHARLAINE HARRIS Shakespeare's Champion

Dell; paperback reprint, November 1998. Hardcover first edition: St. Martin’s, December 1997. Later paperback edition: Berkley, December 2006.

   You could have fooled me, and I was. I didn’t see it coming. I thought this book was one of those “cozy” mysteries that have been flooding the paperbacks shelves at Borders and other outlets over the past ten years or more. What with ice-skating detectives, teddy-bear-collecting detectives, quilting detective, herbal-shop-owner detectives, fudge-making detectives — which is not to put any of them down, as long-time readers of this blog know that most certainly do I not make a habit of — I was caught leaning the wrong way this time, and Ouch.

   Lily Bard is the detective in this one, her second appearance of five so far, and she cleans houses for a living in a small town named Shakespeare, somewhere in Arkansas. What would you think, if that were all you knew about the series?

   My guess is that you’d be wrong, too. There are more dead bodies in this than any Robert B. Parker books you’ve read, and if you stacked two or three of them together, the count might then just start to be close.

CHARLAINE HARRIS Shakespeare's Champion

   There are some things I was unhappy about in this book, the criminous part focusing on racial hatred and violence, but neither that fact nor Lily Bard herself is one of them. She’s quite a lady, having come to Shakespeare to run away from her past, but she works out nearly every morning in the local gym (body building and karate), and does not take any sass from anybody. Hard-boiled, flinty — but in a totally feminine sense — independent. Name it, she’s it.

   I may as well start enumerating some of the problems I had with the book, even though I still haven’t told you much about the story line. First, the prologue, which is not told by Lily, while the rest of the book is. I hate prologues, especially when they are as useless as this one.

   Secondly, while I can understand Lily’s reticence in talking about her past — and she doesn’t for the longest time in this one — she already has in the first one. Revealed her secrets, that is, to at least some of the people in her new life.

   This means that someone who’s already read the first book, as I haven’t, would be reading a totally different book than I was, as he or she would already know the players and the tensions (many sexual) between them, and I didn’t. Lily’s conversation with Claude Friedrich, the local chief of police, as she spurns his amorous advances — soon after the discovery of the first body (although it really isn’t– the first body, that is) — makes a lot more sense later on, then it does in Chapter One. The reader of book one knows, but the reader of book two hasn’t a clue.

CHARLAINE HARRIS Shakespeare's Champion

   I’m making this complicated, but going back and re-reading what I just wrote, it’s correct, and I think I will stay with it the way it is. There has been a series of deaths in Shakespeare, and only gradually are they revealed, and of course they’re important. The blurb on the back cover puts things in the right order, chronologically, but I have to admit that this is only a minor quibble, although a frustrating one, as the characters’ actions reflect what they know, and we (the reader) do not.

   But here’s the greatest problem I found with this book. With a scene of violence as horrific as the one that occurs in this book — if it were to have happened in the real world — it would have made national headlines, news crews from every channel on the cable dial would have been in town, snooping around 24/7, and a real investigation would have gone on, the ending not relying on three people sneaking around at night to uncover the culprits and their plot on their own. And in spite of all of the bloodshed, this strictly amateurish way of nabbing the killers is perhaps what makes this dark and sobering tale story a “cozy” mystery after all.

   Would I read another Lily Bard tale, though? You bet I would. She’s quite a lady.

POSTSCRIPT.    I know they’re too small for the details to be all that helpful, but each of the cover images that I’ve found to add to this post illustrate three different but still vitally important aspects of the book, and in three different styles. I like all three of them.